The hustle and bustle of daily life often leaves us with some key priorities taking a back seat.  And yep, sadly, that’s often nutrition.  If you have kids, you may even ensure your entire family has healthy meals at the go.  But find yourself wondering where your next morsel will come from when the growl of your tummy pangs.  Meal prep is a fantastic way to not only have food at the go for yourself, but it’s also been proven to provide these additional benefits:

• Lose weight through thoughtful selection of nutritional macros.
• Save time by not having to improv your lunch and run around to find the shortest line that has unhealthy food.
• Reduces stress by not frantically having to find food when you start to realize you waited too long to eat.
• Save money by buying food at the grocery store and farmers market.

Now we know meal prep makes sense based on those benefits.  Though if you have ever tried it or heard friends speak of it, you often find the same story title: BORING!  The same meal 5 days a week.  T’is true, meal-prep relies highly on selecting a single dish for the week, writing your ingredients for your grocery list, shopping on your preferred day of the week and on Sunday, it’s go-time. Well, that’s not fun.  And the same food for lunch every day is not fun either.  And we’re about FUN around here, so let’s get some pizzazz in our week and some friends in our weekend.  You can do this a couple ways. Meal-prep with friends.  Find your friends that think this is a good idea to take in all the benefits we’ve already mentioned. Four to seven friends is the perfect sized group to prep food together and make lunch fun again.  You can create a private Facebook Group to collaborate and plan each week.  Be sure each group member posts any food allergies or preferences.  Now, here’s where you have options, you and your friends can cook together or cook independently.  This depends on schedules, flexibility and kitchen sizes.  You can also have a hybrid of a couple folks working together and a few cooking independently. Be sure to have your supplies list for your meal prep.  If your kitchen is prepared for cooking, you may just need meal storage for a week.  You can find these here: http://bit.ly/williamsfoodstorage Now each friend in the meal-prep group can prepare a meal of their choice. Or you can use the ‘poll’ feature in your facebook group and ask the group out of the few dishes you are considering, which sounds best?  Now select your meal and make your shopping list.  Check your cupboard for existing ingredients or fine substitutes to keep your pocket book in check.  Now pick your prep time together or apart.  Prepare to wow your friends so that each day of lunch, there’s a new healthy surprise treat. You can mix this up with picking themes and doing international weeks, specific ingredient challenge weeks, holiday celebration themes.  You will find yourself looking forward to lunch and what’s inside.  You may decide to look ahead of time and you may just enjoy the surprise.  You’ll find yourself being competitive within weeks.  Cute surprise inside.  Now go meal prep with pinnache!